Abstract
The paper explores the hypothesis that access to places that enhance capabilities for co-design work across sectors, is an important vehicle for incubating and sup-porting civic leadership. More specifically, the paper reports insights from a study which created ‘cross-pollination’ spaces to bring together academic and non-academic individuals from different backgrounds, disciplines, and sectors to explore the notion of incubating civic leadership and to develop pop-up interventions to test ideas for incubating civic leadership in two locations in the UK. Drawing on the reflections of participants collected through group reflection spaces and through individual interviews, the study identifies a number of com-mon themes which help understand the value of cross-pollination spaces, but al-so the barriers and enablers of civic design leadership. As such, the study con-tributes to both the theory and practice of co-design within and with communities across sectors.
Keywords
codesign, civic leadership, cross-pollination, empowerment
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.575
Citation
Alexiou, K., Zamenopoulos, T., Hale, V., and de Sousa, S. (2022) Incubating civic leadership in design: The role of cross-pollination spaces, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.575
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Incubating civic leadership in design: The role of cross-pollination spaces
The paper explores the hypothesis that access to places that enhance capabilities for co-design work across sectors, is an important vehicle for incubating and sup-porting civic leadership. More specifically, the paper reports insights from a study which created ‘cross-pollination’ spaces to bring together academic and non-academic individuals from different backgrounds, disciplines, and sectors to explore the notion of incubating civic leadership and to develop pop-up interventions to test ideas for incubating civic leadership in two locations in the UK. Drawing on the reflections of participants collected through group reflection spaces and through individual interviews, the study identifies a number of com-mon themes which help understand the value of cross-pollination spaces, but al-so the barriers and enablers of civic design leadership. As such, the study con-tributes to both the theory and practice of co-design within and with communities across sectors.